I'm not talking about Echelon. I'm talking about how for a distance of about a mile around each of the above named buildings the govt intercepts and listens to each and every cell phone call made or recieved. I was at Langley makeing a delivery and was told as such by several people there. They also ( at Langley ) have jamming technology in place so a cell phone, pager, or text messageing device can not recieve or send any messages on the property. While I was talking with the guys there they told me the NSA building at FT.Meade MD. does the same thing and that the Pentagon listens but does not jam due to the nature of the building and the people in it. But that if need be they can.

They've been listening in for years its just you all don't know it cause your no where near where they do the listening. We haven't been able to get it stopped in all these years what makes any of you think what Bush is doing is ever gonna change? Saddly I don't think it ever will. The precident was set back in the 80's and because it was never challenged properly it continues to this day and it opened the door for Bush to be able to listen to you tell your girl friend good night over the phone.

Congrats on being about 20 years too late with your complaining.





Semper Fi SAINT. May you rest in peace.

They can eaves drop on calls, but if you have digital (GSM) service, you needn't worry. CDMA/TDMA isn't perfect but, in all reality, nothing sold as-is on the market today is bullet-proof.. you need a secondary device. They're not expensive either... about $400 for a matched pair of devices.

I'm not complaining... I knew about the problem when my neighbour complained to my folks that they could hear our phone conversations on their baby monitor.

The problem is that when appeals on this are filed, they're usually ended immediately. There was a point in the WorldCom discovery portion of the trial that the defence tried to acquire the means from which the Fed was getting internal emails, blackberry transmissions and cellular phone logs, and the Judge was instructed to deny the request at discovery due to national secrecy laws. The investigation of WorldCom started a long time before the collapse.

It's not that it hasn't been challenged properly, it cannot be challenged because the Judges haven't got control over that portion of the information. The point is, the information leads to more information that can be had. Either way, it stinks. IIRC there was a bill in senate to reform the communications privacy act, but I think it got defeated. The Patriot act didn't help anything either.




Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

I wasn't saying YOU were complaining Gam I kinda ment everyone whos complaining
about it now and had never said anything about it before. Your up in the frozen north
so I doubt you have a problem beyond the baby monitor thing.

I think it blows that they listen to us really I do but I've said it before and I'll say it again,
We have noone to blame but ourselves for electing them and theres nothing we can do about it so you may as well get used to it. True you don't have to like it but hey what can we do to stop it?




Semper Fi SAINT. May you rest in peace.

Americans make 5 billion phone calls in one day. I heard that in the years since 9/11 the number of phone calls the NSA listened in on was 1,700 calls, which were only monitored because they were going to or coming in from known terror areas. Do the math 1700 calls in 1825+ days, at 5 billion calls per day. They werent listening in to much.

Oh c'mon.. Not only is CSIS part of Echelon, we make most of the listening devices (as well as most of your guidence systems). Don't kid yourself, Canadians are on the leading edge of electronic surveilence.

See, when the folks in Cali are all out surfing, we're still designing and building. I guess our weather patterns ARE good for something.

PAX

PS: we also have a much higher technology adoption rate than the US. IE: there are more computers in Canada per capita than the US.. In fact, I believe we have something like the second highest saturation of all nations worldwide. Second only because Singapore is a Nation, not just a city.

Jack: you can:
a: fight back, lobby your elected officials, and the ones on any commitees that have anything to do with privacy
b: go underground, and use some of the items I've talked about earlier, or.. you know... resort to carrier pigeons.
c: keep taking it.

Hahahaha:
Echelon is a myth. There isn't enough computer power if you took EVERY computer out there and designed a high-speed heuristics program to translate, decode and flag any potential words. If you figure it out, to break GSM phone's encryption (128 bit if it's enabled) it's going to take about 85 days if you use the terra-FLOp computers @ the Atomic Energy Commission to brute force their way into the conversation. now, multiply that by about 100 million customers. It's not there, maybe in 20-25 years when optical processing becomes a reality, but not yet.

I've seen Sigs bases in Letrim and Comox... Trust me, they're having enough problems picking through digital conversations already.



Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

GAM (The Kilted One) wrote:

Hahahaha:
Echelon is a myth. There isn't enough computer power if you took EVERY computer out there and designed a high-speed heuristics program to translate, decode and flag any potential words. If you figure it out, to break GSM phone's encryption (128 bit if it's enabled) it's going to take about 85 days if you use the terra-FLOp computers @ the Atomic Energy Commission to brute force their way into the conversation. now, multiply that by about 100 million customers. It's not there, maybe in 20-25 years when optical processing becomes a reality, but not yet.

I've seen Sigs bases in Letrim and Comox... Trust me, they're having enough problems picking through digital conversations already.

When you express it that way.. If you consider that not all lines need to be monitored at all times. Or as any intelligence agency would do, identify your targets first. That is a different story.

At this point 90% (estimate) of telephone calls are processed in some way. The carriers are now compressing voice signals in order to increase bandwidth without laying new fibre. The company that owns Bell's trunk lines figured out how to get the average voice call down to 6kbs about 9 years ago (used to take about 30kbs to get good quality). So, if every call can be compressed.. or nearly every call anyway.. How much processing power would be required to "listen" to the compression engines and target certain key words. If a trigger is found then the entire stream could be monitored for suspicious conversation.

All trans-Atlantic calls are monitored and have been since WWII. There are good records of every call between Roosevelt and Churchill for example.

so to sum up.. Monitoring is not new. You do not have to monitor the entire contents of every call to be effective. The calls are already being processed. The task is not as big as it may sound.

Think about this... At any one time there are over 50 000 people in the air on commecial jets. We know every name of every person on each flight and a detailed flight plan is also known. Evey single bit of communication is monitored and the aircraft tracked all along the way. There is enough computing capasity to handle near double the normal load.

Who knows what's really possible, but certainly more than the average person might guess.

PAX

But, the thing is, you should divide that 50,000 by about 200 to get an an accurate number... 2500 communication lines are monitored... Not only that, but the data is purged after 48 hours. No retention = no follow up. Also, I know that just by my passport being scanned into the passenger manifest, I was recorded as being in the US/wherever.

Aircraft communication is nothing to monitor because it's broadcast.

Land-based fibre lines are a lot harder to record and process because of scale. Also, figure that in the age of disposable cellular phones, and pay as you go phones only requiring a credit card for activation (not for billing purposes), identifying a target becomes a wee bit more difficult.

Consider:
Fibre communication compression is high-speed and lossy, you're not getting 30% of what you'd normally hear, which is fine because you don't need 100% of the signal... A computer that could break down the sound signals, and process them for one single call is not too hard. Even for 100 calls, not hard at all. On scale alone, you're not even talking water vapor in the bucket, figure 15 billion telephone calls by Americans per year (on varying line/signal quality), that's over 1,712,328 calls per second. Singling out one particular caller... good luck. As I said, it's a cell-phone purchase away. If you figure it takes 3,000 FLOpS (floating point operations per second) to identify and decode (lets forget about buffer, translate and record) each time slice of a conversation, and at any one second, there's over 1.5 million calls happening in the US alone, you're going to literally expend the entire computing ability of every major Computer buyer in the world in a riteous hurry.

The thing about compression: you're dealing with compressing a small amount or information 66% using a standard algorithm. You also neglected to note, the fibre lines didn't need to be upgraded to have the extra capacity, the send/recieve nodes started using wave and spectrum division to increase capacity by about 300%. (I know people that worked in JDS Uniphase and Nortel in R&D. The compression was important, but creating greater usage of the spectrum was the key to the real digital revolution)

Connecting and processing the calls isn't at all hard... really... you hit a serious lag when you start to try to process the language of call (figure 130 cardinal languages in the world, and about 4-5 dialects per language), and an even greater lag problem when you try to record that to a storage media of some sort (It's like planting a football stadium's grass one blade at a time for comparison).

The conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt were recorded and stenographed by a Whitehouse clerk in the basement with a recorder. FDR ordered the recorder installed so he could leverage anyone that tried to misrepresent (or out and out lie) about what he had said... it was more about keeping the press in check than anything.




Transeat In Exemplum: Let this stand as the example.

The NSA has always recorded every call on the trans-atlantic cable right from day one. It's part of their job. That's the other way Roosevelt and Churchill were taped.

I see your point GAM, but again, you do not need to tap every call to be effective.

I would not suggest that every single call is monitored, as yousay, that would take far too much computing power. On the flip side though.. If you have a list of "suspects" to monitor, that might be a couple thousand calls per day. That is easily achieved.

No I do not believe in umbrella survielence, but to think that the capabilities to monitor and record aren't there is a bit nieve.

It's not all or nothing.. We know it's not all, it's time realize it's some.. A large sum.

PAX

yea because weaker border security makes us safer?

ppl in the military dont have a @!#$ clue most of the time anyway



1989 Turbo Trans Am #82, 2007 Cobalt SS G85

Ummm, where'd that come from?

Nobody was talking about border security.

PAX